Innovative
solutions to the design, management and maintenance of urban
greenspace

Bo01 - City of
Tomorrow - Malmo, Sweden

Example
of a new city district designed as a sustainable urban unit.
The impact of a "green point system" on the design of
greenspace within the new housing

The European Housing
Expo was held in Malmö from 17 May to 16 September
2001. The site is a new city district on reclaimed land by
the Västra Hamnen (Western Docks). It is a magnificent
site overlooking the Öresund strait between Sweden and
Denmark. The conditions are difficult for plant growth and
survival and the site is potentially very wind-swept - the
soil conditions are poor because it is underlaid with
reclaimed industrial land, having been below sea level about
100 years ago.

In these pages
Bo01
Expo as a whole
is not reviewed - only the solutions used for providing
greenspace within the main housing areas of the site and the
experimental approaches taken are considered.

Bo01's main
residential blocks - one of the foremost examples of
sustainable housing in Europe

The houses, flats and
terraced housing are all for sale and mostly sold already.
The greenspace within the housing areas is mostly communal
in the form of residential
courtyards with
small private gardens or balconies. A Green Area Factor
system was introduced to ensure that all developers met an
adequate standard in relation to ensuring design and
management solutions which support an enhanced level of
biodiversity.

The site has been
planned as a sustainable development. Wind power, solar
power and hydro power are produced locally and supplied to
the site. Greenspaces are seen as essential to enhance the
level of biodiversity within the site. The Bo01 area uses
the most up-to-date ecotechnology for the treatment of water
and waste. For example, all food waste is sorted by means of
food waste disposers and a mobile vacuum system, which has
been built underground to deal with both food waste and
residual waste in separate tanks. A vacuum waste vehicle
then collects the waste when the tanks are full. Phosphorus
is extracted through new technology, KREPRO, and recycled.
All materials (newspapers, packaging, batteries, etc.) are
sorted and recycled. Waste water is treated as elsewhere in
Malmo - treated clean water from the site goes into the
Öresund Strait and raw sludge is sent to the digester
plant and turned into biogas. Waste that cannot be sorted is
incinerated and the energy extracted to transform into
heating for housing in Malmö and Burlov. Bo01 has been
nominated as part of the EU's "Campaign for Take Off"
initiative as the foremost example of renewable energy
source development in Europe. [Summarised from The
Ecocycle at Bo01 - a brochure available to
visitors.]

Some of the terraced
houses have roof gardens consisting of sedum.

Others are more
adventurous with substantial roof gardens using a wide range
of plant material - these areas

are maintained by the
house owners.

The courtyard areas
vary: each is laid out according to a points
system which
gives a higher grade for "greener" features, e.g. a tree or
a water feature counts for more points than a square meter
of grass; this system has encouraged variety in the
gardens.

There are also some low
rise small dwellings on this mixed site - many of these have
very small gardens which open out onto a communal
greenspace.

The whole site is
pedestrian only; parking of residents' cars will be in
designated parking areas outside the housing area itself.
The housing is exceptionally expensive, with service charges
of 20,000 SKr (£1300, Euros 2200 per month) in addition
to the actual cost of buying the apartments. Note:
Malmö city is home to a substantial number of
multi-national companies and this might explain the ability
of people to buy and pay the service charges on such houses
- almost all the houses have sold.

Residential
Courtyards in Bo01 (summarised from documents for
visitors)

From the beginning the
intention was that greenery or water should be visible from
all dwelling units.

To ensure consistency of
quality of the residential courtyards, a series of rules was
drawn up for architects and landscape architects relating to
the greenspaces. Landscape architects had to be employed if
a developer wanted to build on the site and the developer
had to set up a mechanism for the long-term management and
maintenance of the outdoor spaces associated with the
development, including all greenspace not designated as
parkland. The same rules were applied to all
developers.

The landscape architects
had to consult with Bo01 and the city of Malmö Green
Department. The aim was for the landscape architect to be
engaged at a very early stage, since previous experience
indicates that with few exceptions, there is very little
appreciation of the importance of designing the greenspaces
at the same time as the buildings, resulting in many cases
in makeshift external environments.

The result is an
interesting complexity of interlinked greenspaces at the
core of the housing - with open expanses of water, retention
basins, biotope variation, transit opportunities for
wildlife between courtyards and the public space, private
patios, sunlit spaces for play, and meeting spaces for
socialising. The designers and developers were allowed a
fairly free hand so that sufficient diversity of design
solution could be achieved. However, the city and Bo01
organisers were insistent about two aspects in relation to
greenspaces within the housing areas:

Greenspace
factor and Green points

A "greenspace
factor" has been worked out, partly inspired by
experience in Berlin during the 1990s. This factor is
measured as an average value for the whole area of the plot,
with values of between 0.0 and 1.0 awarded to the different
sub areas, according to the opportunities they afford for
vegetation, ecology and local storm water
management.

The rule for these
housing areas was that the average value for any greenspace
or courtyard within the housing must not be less than
0.5.

There are many possible
ways of making such a scheme work - green roofs and walls,
for example. It was noticeable that the developers and
architects liked this scheme, even if some ecologists and
landscape architects remain dubious about reducing
greenspace provision to a series of rules.
Note:
it may well be that local residents in other areas would
also like what would be to them a "clear guidance" on the
qualities that their adjacent greenspaces should
have.

Every residential
courtyard in Bo01 had to be provided by the developer with
at least 10 green measures from the list entitled "Green
Points". The aim of these points is to give Bo01 a
distinct and interesting profile as regards the ecology and
sustainability.

Example from
Bo01 of calculating the Green Factor for the
residential courtyards - the following is only
an extract from the full scoring system - there are
many more items which can gain a point (the
original list is available in Swedish from
Malmö city).

m2

Factor

Score for a
site

a garden
plot

951

0.5

476

green on the
ground

129

1,0

127

green on the
wall

112

0,7

78

green
roof

330

0.8

264

open
water

23

1.0

23

climbing
plants

72

0.2

14

Large trees to be
provided and maintained by the developer

As part of a more
conventional approach to ensuring a high quality of visual
image, the residential courtyards had to be planted with big
trees. This policy was in keeping with Bo01's `Trees in Time
project´, for which quantities of big trees were
organised as soon as the site planning started. This allowed
the trees to be properly prepared over several years for the
difficult conditions of a new building site. The trees were
grown in a special cultivation system which made it possible
for them to be planted fully in leaf, and also in bloom -
they have made a major contribution to the visual and
spatial qualities of the external environment. To ensure
that the trees were properly planted and looked after, each
developer had to organise long-term management and
maintenance as part of the service charges. The developers
paid for the trees and all that needed to be done to prepare
them for the site. (This is all too rarely done in Britain,
with the result that many of the trees planted by developers
on new housing areas die within a few years - often just
because the ground conditions were never properly created to
allow a tree to grow)